A long article, but a must-read for anyone wanting to know "what's happening with the people".<p>> To be sure, vigilance against narrative is a fundamental duty of the politically engaged citizen. That vigilance is how we replace thoughtless compliance with the preferences of a nudging state and nudging oligarchy with critical thought and autonomy of mind instead. Narrative antipathy, however, simply replaces one form of thoughtless compliance with another. Instead of blithely submitting to the framing and opinions-presented-as-fact spoon-fed to us by corporate media institutions, we blithely and confidently disregard entire populations of humans and entire fields of human knowledge simply because they were part of an effort to nudge us.<p>> I get it. Narrative antipathy feels like it should be a natural extension of or a response to narrative awareness. I tell you that it is the opposite. Narrative awareness is an on switch for autonomy of mind. Narrative antipathy is an off switch.<p>> And there is nothing more useful to manipulative institutions than an off switch for autonomy of mind.<p>In the west we've got demoralised just like Russians, but instead of one state driven narrative that nothing is known, we got so many different narratives we don't have enough thinking time to know which to trust.